Here is an almost free craft if you own some permanent markers and what ever you have to pay for the straws. I never made any shrinky dinks when I was little, I remember seeing them on TV but none ever made it to my house. Too bad my mom didn’t know about clear plastic number 6! You know the clear trays that pastries and salad come in at the supermarket. You may look a little weird (like me) at the store picking up packages of croissants or precut salad to look under for the number inside the triangle. That I know of you are only supposed to use the ones that are number 6. I couldn’t bring myself to buy some of that salad (you can cut your own for alot less money) so I asked at the bakery and they happily gave me a few packages.
Next, I downloaded a lego font from here and printed all the names I needed. Increase the size of your font until it is about 1.5 inches tall. Your plastic strips will be about 2 to 2.5 inches tall and as wide as the name on them. With a black sharpie I traced them. The finished project will be 1/3rd smaller than when it began and about 3 times thicker so keep this in mind while planning your project.
then I filled in the black lines to make them look thick like the font on legos is as well as joining all the letters in between by coloring with black in between
next I traced around the black with yellow sharpie and then with red
now keep coloring with the red until you have a rectangle that is all colored in. Ignore the hole puncher, that was for another project : ) Oh… preheat your oven to 350 F.
place your colored plastic strips on a cookie sheet covered in foil or just put them on foil
put them into the oven. If you have a window in your oven you can watch the fun, if you don’t wait 90 seconds and then slightly open the oven door to keep an eye on it. At first it will curl and wave like crazy but within 3-4 minutes it will shrink and flatten down to about 1/3rd of the original size. When you take them out of the oven, you have about 10 seconds to press them flatter if you want or curve them or whatever else you want the plastic to do before it becomes hard. Be careful with the oven and use precaution when taking the shrinky dinks out and handling them until they cool off.
With a glue gun, glue the name tags to the straw. done. This is my original idea, If you like it enough to try it on your blog please link back to this post ; )
To see the whole party visit here
